Greek Easter bread – Tsureki – with sourdough – Yannis and Stella @Apollon, Naxos

Ingredients

Steps

Previous day

Warm the 20ml milk and the 20gr sugar
Add the milk to the sourdough starter but check first with your finger that is not too warm. You do not want to kill your sourdough
Add 30gr of all purpose flour
Let it in room temperature till you see bubbles and you know your starter started working (if your kitchen is cold enough, you could leave it on the counter overnight)
Add one more part of sourdough starter (20gr)
Warm the 30ml milk with the 60gr sugar and add them to your dough again after checking that the milk didn´t get too warm
Beat the egg and add it as well in the dough
Add the bread flour together with the mastic and the mahlepi and mix it well
It is not sticky this dough, so if yours is wet add some flour and if it is stiff add some milk. The humidity in your dough depends on the starter as well, so yours might be different than mine
Let it in temperature room for a couple of hours
Add the butter in 2 times and mix well. The dough will become very sticky from the butter
Divide the dough it 2 pieces
Then divide each piece in 3 more or less equals
Let it rest in the fridge overnight

Baking day

Remove the dough from the fridge and let it in room temperature for at least an hour
The dough should get double
make 3 strings (at least 30cm long) with each division you did and let it rest for a while
Form your tsureki – Check fotos – The traditional way to go it to form braids
Let them almost double in size
Bake in 220 degrees Celsius for 12 minutes with aluminum on top and approximately for 8 minutes more without the aluminum in 200 degrees till they get golden brown on top
Let them in the oven (the oven is turned of) for a couple of minutes and then remove them and let them cool down

Greek Easter bread – Tsureki – with sourdough